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THE METAL-BENDERS by PROFESSOR JOHN B. HASTED

Encouraged by my experiences on the teleportation of small objects out of capsules by Nicholas Williams, I tried a similar approach on Stephen North. Stephen, then aged thirteen, had experienced a few such events in his own home, but did not know what to make of them. I was therefore careful not to explain too much about the nature of teleportation, but I waited until he was successfully performing metal-bending in my laboratory, and then introduced him to a small plastic box containing three metal single crystals. I told him that if he had sufficient confidence ‘something’ might happen to the crystals. A series of events followed which surprised me considerably; they exceeded what I had expected, and Stephen’s excitement was great.

The box was an opaque plastic egg (2 in. X 1 in.) previously belonging to Andrew G. The halves fitted snugly together, and I carefully wound Scotch tape several times round them to make a good seal; removing the wrapping would normally take about half a minute, unless damage were permitted. At 11.30 am Stephen started to shake the plastic egg, which rattled continuously, the crystals being inside. After a few minutes, all of it in my field of vision, the rattle suddenly ceased; there was a clear inference that the crystals had left the egg. I decided not to open it up at this stage, but to ask Stephen to shake the egg some more to try and get the crystals back. He did this, but there was still no rattle. On opening up the egg I found not crystals, but a £1 Bank of England note, number HN15.686737, which Stephen thought had been in his pocket previously; indeed, this banknote was found to be missing. One crystal, a vanadium carbide ingot, was still in the egg (or had left and returned), and was prevented from rattling by the pound note. In Stephen’s back pocket, tightly zip-fastened, were found the zinc and germanium crystals.

I replaced all the crystals in the egg, and nothing happened until 2.15 pm, when we again checked them and found them present. I resealed the egg and Stephen continued to handle it in my full view until 2.20 pm, when the rattling stopped, and I opened the egg and found it empty. The banknote was still in Stephen’s pocket, but no crystals. However I found an unexpected object in his pocket: a broken cufflink of mine which had been stored away in a polythene bag in a desk drawer, following its fracture during a cutlery-bending session of Uri Geller. Stephen had not been near the drawer, and was puzzled by it all.

After 2.25 pm Stephen suddenly cried out; there was something in his mouth – it turned out to be the germanium crystal. Stephen did not know that other events of this type had been reported, and he was rather scared.

In order to get him away from the scene of action, I took him out to another laboratory and locked the office door behind us.

When we returned about twenty minutes later I entered the office first and almost immediately saw one of the zinc crystals in a prominent position on a ledge which had been empty when we left. Stephen thought that the paper-chart-roll box might contain a crystal, and I at once found the vanadium carbide ingot inside. We then searched my briefcase, and the other zinc crystal was found inside.

During this period a number of metal objects in the laboratory were found to have bent; I continued at intervals to shake the plastic egg, empty and re-sealed empty at 2.20 pm, to see if there was anything inside it. At 3.30 it was found to rattle, and a small strip of aluminium alloy, an anomalous plane bend by Willie G., was found inside. I took it out and re-sealed the egg; but at 3.45 Stephen’s bank note HN15.686737 was again found inside the egg, after he had told me that it was missing from his pocket.

It was time for Stephen to go, so I gave him the egg and also an identified aluminium bar. He handled the bar in the taxi as we drove down Gower Street to Shaftesbury Avenue. But when we reached Trafalgar Square he could not find the aluminium bar in the taxi. I said nothing, but when I had left Stephen on the underground train, homeward bound, I returned immediately to the laboratory and found the identified bar on a stool. I did not have to have clairvoyant powers to suspect that the laboratory was the obvious place to which it would teleport.

This account reads just as though a mischievous boy had been playing tricks all day; but of course I was very careful to watch the sealed plastic egg all the time that I could, and I had deliberately tried to make it difficult for Stephen to misbehave. I have gone carefully over the events of the day, and am unable to fault my observation of Stephen.

On one further occasion Stephen has had success with the plastic egg. We had just completed a metal-bending session on an aluminium crystal complete with six resistive strain gauge sensors. He had been unusually successful at achieving signals, and was excited. He took the egg, which was sealed with Scotch tape and was supposed to contain a small flint arrowhead and a marked electrical spade terminal. I inspected and re-sealed the objects in the egg, and Stephen took a cup from his mother and drank his tea, having placed the egg beside him. But when he reached the bottom of the cup, the spade terminal confronted him; the flint arrowhead remained within the egg. Stephen is still in possession of the egg, and occasional teleportations in and out of it are reported. (The above event was also witnessed by David Robertson.)